Let’s say you really, really identify with your Sun sign and love reading your horoscope for it. Why would reading for your Rising sign be better than that? Turns out there’s a logical reason, which becomes immediately apparent if you work with birth charts.
Horoscope-writing astrologers won’t be using your personal chart when they write their dailies or monthlies. The best shot they have at examining something remotely close is by orienting the chart so the signs on the houses match the signs on the houses in *your* chart. Is Capricorn your 7th house? Great, now they know that, because they oriented the chart using your Rising sign. Your Rising sign is where your Ascendant is placed, which becomes the first house using whole sign houses. Each sign that comes after that becomes another house.
The following chart has Cancer Rising. All Cancer Risings have Capricorn on their 7th house of partnership when using whole sign houses. So if there’s, say, a perilous eclipse or a looming Saturn-Pluto conjunction, the horoscope-writing astrologer will know that that’s likely happening in the area of *relationships* for all Cancer Risings.
But if you have a Pisces Sun? That Pisces Sun could be in ANY house of your birth chart. The horoscope-writing astrologer has no way of knowing; they’d need to see your personal natal chart for that. Without factoring in the Rising sign, horoscopes are reliant on what aspects the planets are making, but they don’t have the context of the houses, or what area of life it’s taking place in.
When writing for your Sun sign, they can use derivative houses, starting with the Sun in the first house. In the above example, the Sun is in Capricorn, so that would “become” the derived first house for this exercise, and following this, Aquarius would be the derived second house, Pisces would be the derived third house, etc. And if you’re a Cancer Rising, you know your second house is typically Leo, not Aquarius. Derivative houses may be able to provide some information, but the clearest and most accurate picture comes from the Rising sign, because it goes hand in hand with your personal signs and houses.
How well this works in practice, I’ll leave it up to you. My main purpose here is to explain the logic behind reading for your Rising sign. You can always read for your Sun, Moon, and Rising as well!
I identify with my Sun sign a great deal, and this doesn’t take away from that, but the Rising sign comes closer to reflecting an outline of what your actual birth chart looks like. The horoscope-writing astrologer still won’t know where the planets were at the time of your birth, or what aspects they were making to each other then, unless you sit down with them for an individual reading. But knowing the Rising sign, and which signs go with which houses in your chart, gets them a lot closer to personalizing that horoscope in a way that jives with you.